Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America
had better learn baseball.
-Jacques Barzun (God's
Country and Mine)

At this point, that quote is so old that I just sort of assumed Barzun
must be dead by now. But I heard an interview with him the other
day on NPR about his new book, From
Dawn to Decadence - 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to Present,
which sounds like it will be excellent, and then, serendipitously, I stumbled
upon this fairly recent book of his essays. As the title of his newer
effort might lead you to assume, these essays reflect a profound concern
about the direction in which modern culture is headed. Tackling topics
which range from government patronage of the arts to the writing of history
to the teaching of Humanities, the book is unified by the theme of decline
in the West, but it ends on an upbeat note as he assumes that the seeds
of the next great Civilization must even now have been sown in the root
of our culture.

Having taught at Columbia for over 60 years, Barzun is particularly
interested in the complete hash that we have made of the academy.
In Where is History Now?, he offers a devastating critique of the
way modern Historians have come to focus almost entirely on not merely
social history, but the social history of marginal groups, to the exclusion
of great persons, big events and sweeping trends. He traces the beginnings
of this problem to the Annales group in France, influenced by Durkheim
and others:

It was soon found that many kinds of documents existed,
so far untouched and worth
exploiting--county archives, private contracts,
children's books, records of matriculation at colleges
and universities, the police blotter in big cities,
gravestones in cemeteries--a whole world of
commonplace papers and relics to be organized into
meanings. Such documents told nothing
important individually; they had to be classified
and counted. Theirs was a mass meaning, and it
brought one nearer to the life of the people; it
satisfied democratic feelings.

One result of this search for arcania is that the history books that
are produced are unreadable catalogues of stuff:

History is not a piece of crockery dredged up from
the Titanic; it is, first, the shipwreck, then a
piece of writing. What is more, it is a piece
of writing meant to be read, not merely entered on
shelves and in bibliographies. By these criteria,
modern man must be classed as a stranger to
history; he is not eager for it nor bothered by
the lack of it. The treasure hunt for artifacts seems to
him a sufficient acknowledgment of the past.

The other main result is that these historians end up specializing so
completely in one discrete topic, even within the already unuseful field
of social studies, that they lack any broader perspective.

He broaches this topic again in Exeunt the Humanities, wherein
he particularly decries the tendency towards overspecialization:

The danger is that we shall become a nation of pedants.
I use the word literally and democratically
to refer to the millions of people who are moved
by a certain kind of passion in their pastimes as
well as in their vocations. In both parts
of their lives this passion comes out in shoptalk. I have in
mind both the bird watchers and nature lovers: the
young people who collect records and follow the
lives of pop singers and movie stars; I mean the
sort of knowledge possessed by "buffs" and "fans"
of all species--the baseball addicts and opera goers,
the devotees of railroad trains and the collectors
of objects, from first editions to netsuke.

They are pedants not just because they know and recite
an enormous quantity of facts--if a school
required them to learn as much they would scream
against tyranny. It is not the extent of their
information that appalls; it is the absence of any
reflection upon it, any sense of relation between it
and them and the world. Nothing is brought
in from outside for contrast or comparison; no
perspective is gained from the top of their monstrous
factual pile; no generalities emerge to lighten
the sameness of their endeavor.

If you wish to see an illustration of Barzun's basic point, stop by
a newsstand some time and try to find yourself a good general interest
magazine. They no longer exist; there are of course many more types
of magazines than ever before, but they are so specialized, tabloidized
or politicized that you're unlikely to find more than one or two stories
in each one that are actually worth reading for anyone other than a fanatic.

In one of the best essays in the collection he takes on the Bugbear
of Relativism. Moral relativism is one of the hackneyed phrases
that we conservatives toss around to account for the wide variety of ills
we discern in modern society. Barzun deftly sketches a brief theory
of the history of moral behavior, which posits that this problem is natural
and cyclical:

It is a commonplace that periods of strictness are
followed by periods of looseness. But what is it
that tells us in retrospect which is strict and
which loose? Surely the change observed is not in
morals, that is, in deep feelings rooted
in conscience, which are by definition hidden. The change
is in mores--conventions, attitudes, manners,
speech, and the arts; in a word, what the people are
happy or willing to allow in public.

I suggest further that this change precedes the swing
of the moral pendulum. This is not to say that
the change is one of surface only, a shift of fashion
among the visible upper classes. The public
gradually accepts change under the pressure of social
need or cultural aims, then comes the loosening
or tightening of behavior in the lives of untold
others beyond the fashion-makers. Untold is the
word to bear in mind. For throughout every
change the good habits of millions remain constant--or
societies would fall apart; the bad habits likewise--or
the police could be disbanded and the censors
silenced.

The insight here, the divergence between morals and mores, and the fact
that the great majority of people continue to adhere to moral precepts
regardless of the current mores, is especially compelling. And the
metaphor of the pendulum, implying as it does that the swing back must
surely be coming, gives one great reason for hope.

These are just a couple of the issues that Barzun raises in this consistently
interesting collection. His writing is wise and witty and not at
all pessimistic. Even as he surveys the wreckage of our culture in
the final essay, Toward the Twenty-First Century, though he provides
one of the clearest definitions of the general concern that animates conservatives:

The very notion of change, of which the twentieth
century makes such a weapon in the advocacy of
every scheme, implies the notion of loss; for in
society as in individual life many desirable things are
incompatible--to say nothing of the fact that the
heedlessness or violence with which change takes
place brings about the incidental destruction of
other useful attitudes and institutions.

he also ends on the hopeful note that:

...a last consolation for us--as long as man exists,
civilization and all its works exist in germ.
Civilization is not identical with our civilization,
and the rebuilding of states and cultures, now or at
any time, is integral to our nature and more becoming
than longing and lamentations.

This kind of faith in mankind and an overall generosity of spirit serve
the author well, tempering his often scathing indictment of modern culture
with an optimism for the future which is all too unusual in conservative
critics. I look forward to reading his new book.